AEAL 2016
Filippová, Eva
[email protected]
Pragmatic and social-cognitive skills in the Czech Deaf
Filippová, Eva & Hudáková, Andrea
Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
[email protected]
Despite much progress in the empirical research on deaf children’s development, claims
about deafness as a handicap are still pervasive in the medical discourse of the present-day
Czech society. Deaf have been declared to reach lower cognitive milestones compared to
their hearing peers, as documented by the statistics for the literacy and ratios of deaf and
hearing within their respective populations. Hearing impediment has thus been a blame for
the failure of reaching cognitive potentials of these individuals (e.g., Komínek, 2009), along
with some of the mainstream societal standards.
In a review of over 20 studies, Peterson (2009) demonstrates that only a paucity of even 11year-old severely deaf children with hearing parents passed standard tasks assessing their
social cognition, usually mastered by typically developing 5-year-olds. Moreover, such delays
in pre-lingual hearing-challenged individuals occur in both children with cochlear implants or
in those communicating with their caregivers in sign language. These marked delays come in
a sharp contrast with little or no delay documented in deaf children of signing parents. This
may be due to the richness of their conversational input during their early ontogeny (Harris
2005, 2006).
Method
Our study has been testing Czech deaf and hearing children’s respective skills in theory of
mind. To this date, 10 deaf children and 23 hearing children were tested on the adapted
battery of ToM skills (Hutchins & Prelock, 2010) (see Figure 1 for a sample of a ToM task and
Figure 2 for the respective test questions).
Figure 1: A sample task.
B
Toto je Hanka.
Hanka chce jíst sušenky.
This is Hanka. Hanka wants to eat some cookies.
Version 1— 1-Jun-16
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AEAL 2016
Filippová, Eva
[email protected]
Figure 2: Test questions
B
B. CQ1: Co chce Hanka?
 □ pomocná Q: Chce dort, sušenky,
lízátko, nebo čokoládu?
 špatně:  C, s. 7
What does Hanka want?
B: CQ1—Control question 1: Does she want some cake, cookies, lollypop, or chocolate? If
the response is wrong, continue to task C, page 7.
Results
Preliminary results seem to confirm our hypothesis in that Deaf CzSL users are as competent
as their hearing peers in their performance on the ToM battery of tasks, in a contrast to the
Deaf users of spoken Czech.
Discussion
As a first endeavor of this kind in the Czech Deaf community, our aim has been to document
that deaf individuals can, indeed, reach the full potential as can their hearing peers,
provided they have the tools to communicate with and represent through a complex
independent language in whatever modality.
References
Harris, P. L. (2005). Conversation, pretense and theory of mind. In J. W. Astington & J. A. Baird (Eds.),
Why language matters for theory of mind (pp. 70–83). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Harris, P. L. (2006). Social cognition. In W. Damon & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology.
Volume 2. Cognition, perception, and language (pp. 811–858). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Hutchins, T. F, & Prelock, P. A. (2010). Theory of Mind Task Battery.
http://www.theoryofmindinventory.com/task-battery/ (accessed 9 September 2015).
Komínek (2009). Screening sluchu – současné možnosti vyšetřování [Screening of hearing–the
contemporary options for assessment]. Medical Tribune, 12. http://www.tribune.cz/clanek/13748screening-sluchu-amp-soucasne-moznosti-vysetrovani (accessed 1 August 2014).
Peterson, C. C. (2009). Development of social-cognitive and communication skills in children born
deaf. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 50, 475–483.
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